Opinion: A multi-ethnic view that fails to work

CHARLEY REESESyndicated Columnist

Published Sunday, August 12, 2001

You might recall that the Tamil Tigers raided Sri Lanka's airport recently. They did a pretty good job. Knocked out about half the national fleet and shut the airport down for a number of hours. Scared the stew out of all the tourists, too.

Well, Sri Lanka, which used to be called Ceylon, has no national or security interest for us at all, so we needn't worry about it. On the other side of the world, NATO has been trying to get Macedonians and Albanians to kiss and make up. Macedonia, likewise, has no strategic or national-security interest for us. Don't need to worry about that, either.

Nevertheless, from both places we can learn a valuable lesson. Multiculturalism doesn't work. In both places you have keen hostility between two ethnic groups of people. If you will just look around the world, you will see that the most politically and socially stable countries are those with the most homogenous populations. The multi-ethnic countries are either in a state of war or have a strong central government to keep the lid on ethnic rivalries.

Despite what you hear from our urban liberal pals, people are a great deal more tribal than liberals want to admit. You can tell the Macedonians and the Albanians that they're practically just alike until you're blue in the face, and they won't buy it. You can even tell them that 97 percent of their genes are probably identical. Doesn't matter. It's the 3 percent difference that counts.

That's true, too. Even if a Chihuahua and a Doberman share 97 percent of the same genes, the 3 percent they don't share is one whopping difference.

I've noticed that American liberals keep trying every which way they can to sell the notion of the common universal man, as socialists have been trying to do for a couple of hundred years now. It won't fly. There is no such creature. The fact that all humans have two feet doesn't mean that they're willing to park them under the same table.

Just look at the killing going on today and at the killing that's been going on for the past 50 years. Nearly all of it is tribal or ethnic conflicts. Our little people in pinstripes just make fools out of themselves, scurrying about and telling people who hate each other's guts to just get along.

George Bush has made another blunder by not pulling our troops out of the Balkans, as he definitely hinted he would do. They can sit there 50 years, and the day they leave, all the ethnic groups will dig up their weapons and resume their wars. The only thing that works with ethnic rivalries is separation, but for some strange reason, we are insanely committed to forcing Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs and Croats to live in one multi-ethnic state. Never going to happen. Now we seem determined to force the Albanians and the Macedonians to live together happily ever after. Never going to happen.

You would think that by now, the U.S. government would have figured out that the troublemakers in the Balkans are the Albanians. Their population has exploded, and they are looking to create a greater Albania using most of Kosovo and a big hunk of Macedonia. That seems as plain to me as a donkey at a faculty tea party.

This is going to be an ongoing, long-range conflict, and we have no business getting involved in it. Bush ought to tell the Europeans: "Look, if you want to keep meddling in the Balkans, be our guest, but our boys are going home. Right now."

It ought to be written in stone that we should never, ever intervene militarily in any ethnic conflict or territorial dispute outside our own borders. But, as John Wayne was fond of saying, "That'll be the day."